A global icon, a heavyweight manufacturing partner, and 27,000 retail doors were not enough to save Más+. For East African entrepreneurs banking on celebrity endorsement as a growth strategy, the lesson is sobering.
In January 2026, Mark Anthony Group, the beverage conglomerate behind White Claw, quietly discontinued Más+ by Messi, the sports drink it had launched with the world’s most marketable footballer less than two years earlier. The official statement was characteristically restrained: the brand “did not achieve all of our objectives.” For a business press accustomed to reading between corporate lines, the message was clear. A global icon could move product off a shelf once. He could not build a habit.
The Launch: A Masterclass in Distribution
There is no faulting the go-to-market execution. Messi announced the drink on Instagram on 4 June 2024. Nine days later it was in Miami retail, stocked in Publix, Walmart and available via same-day delivery through Gopuff. The website’s initial inventory sold out within the hour.
From there, the brand scaled aggressively, the kind of expansion that would make any regional FMCG executive take notice. Within a year, Más+ was carried in more than 27,000 stores across the United States, spanning Walmart, Target, Albertsons, Safeway and Dick’s Sporting Goods, with a parallel presence on Amazon. The company reported 5.5 million units consumed and month-on-month sales growth of 85 percent during its national rollout.
Canada followed through 7-Eleven and Circle K. The United Kingdom secured an exclusive listing with SPAR in March 2025. Spain came on board through beverage group Damm in October 2025, and Australia through 7-Eleven.
For context, this is a distribution footprint most African beverage startups would need a decade, and considerable capital, to build organically. Más+ achieved it in under twelve months, purely on the strength of one man’s global profile.
And yet, by mid-2025, cracks were visible. UK consumers openly compared the product to rival brand Prime, with some retailers reportedly unable to move stock at all. The UK e-commerce site eventually went offline. Major retailers listed the product as unavailable.
The Litigation: When the Founder Story Becomes a Liability
Beyond the commercial headwinds, Más+ was entangled in an increasingly public legal dispute with Prime Hydration, the brand co-founded by YouTubers Logan Paul and KSI.
Mark Anthony filed first, in October 2024, seeking a New York federal court ruling that the Más+ bottle design did not infringe on Prime’s trade dress. Prime counter-sued, alleging consumer confusion over bottle shape, colour palette and marketing language.
The dispute escalated materially in October 2025, when Prime filed a separate false advertising suit in Florida. The central allegation was reputationally damaging: that Messi had not, in fact, created the drink, that the packaging had been finalised by Mark Anthony before his involvement began, and that his contribution was limited to licensing his name, image and signature. Prime’s legal team cited an earlier affidavit from Messi’s own camp, filed in the New York proceedings, confirming this timeline.
In February 2025, the dispute took a personal turn, with Messi’s lawyers accusing Prime of harassment over a demand that he personally attend a settlement conference; a judge ultimately excused him from appearing.
Both cases were dismissed with prejudice on 6 January 2026, with terms undisclosed. For African business leaders considering high-profile brand ambassadorships, the takeaway is instructive: litigation of this nature does not merely cost legal fees. It consumes the narrative bandwidth a young brand needs to build genuine consumer trust.
Why the Brand Actually Failed
Strip away the courtroom drama, and the core issue was structural. The global sports hydration category is dominated by entrenched players, Gatorade and BodyArmor between them command the overwhelming majority of shelf space in mature markets.
Margins in the category are notoriously thin, retailers reset planograms on performance data rather than sentiment, and “low sugar, clean label” positioning is now table stakes rather than differentiation. Once the novelty of a celebrity-fronted launch faded, Más+ was competing on the same unforgiving terms as every unknown entrant, and it lost.
Prime: The Cautionary Tale That Preceded It
Contrary to any narrative of triumph, Prime itself offers little comfort to advocates of celebrity-led branding. The company’s revenue surged from approximately $250 million in 2022 to $1.2 billion in 2023 on the back of viral scarcity marketing, before contracting sharply. UK turnover fell from £112.2 million to £32.8 million in a single year, a decline of roughly 71 percent. US tracked sales dropped approximately 40 percent in the first half of 2024, with a trailing twelve-month decline of 42 percent later confirmed by Circana.
Despite near-universal brand awareness, repeat purchase rates sat at just 12 percent. The brand has also faced school bans across the UK and Australia, a protracted PFAS-related class action, a roughly $68 million lawsuit from bottling partner Refresco over a cancelled production agreement, and in July 2026, its Australian subsidiary entered administration holding approximately A$85,000 in cash against nearly A$8 million in liabilities.
The Lesson for African Enterprise
For East African executives and entrepreneurs evaluating celebrity partnerships, whether with athletes, musicians or social media figures, the Más+ and Prime cases offer a clear governance lesson: fame accelerates distribution, but it does not substitute for product economics, category strategy or operational discipline.
A recognisable face can open doors with retailers and secure an impressive initial listing. It cannot, on its own, defend margin against entrenched incumbents, absorb the cost of intellectual property disputes, or convert a first-time curiosity purchase into a repeat one. That work still falls to fundamentals: unit economics, distribution efficiency, category insight and brand equity built over years, not launch weekends.
The market does not reward who is attached to a brand. It rewards whether consumers return once the cameras have moved on.
